Sascha Doering’s first job was in an Ikea cafeteria in Germany. He got the job to save up for his first set of wheels.
But his dream of owning a high-performance car would have to wait. He couldn’t get his license until he turned 18, so Doering bought the next-best thing: a midnight-blue Vespa with a white leather seat.
“The motivation around wheels was already there,” Doering told Business Insider. “I just needed to start with two wheels rather than four.”
He did not have the motor scooter for long. After “a few thousand kilometers,” Doering said, it was involved in a crash.
These days, he’s much closer to that childhood dream. Doering is now the chief operating officer of Bugatti Americas, where he helps sell the luxury hypercar maker’s roughly $5 million vehicles to ultra-high-net-worth customers in the US.
Selling those cars requires an unusually personal touch with some of the world’s richest buyers.
A calendar filled with clients’ kids’ birthdays
Bugatti’s business is not built on volume.
Each year, the company builds 80 to 100 cars for the global market, Doering said. In a good year, around 40 of those vehicles make it to US shores — so each customer is unusually important to keep engaged.
“Personal relationships are of the utmost importance,” Doering said. “We cannot substitute clients. We cannot lose clients because they are so rare, as rare as our products are.”
So Doering says he sticks around in customers’ lives, even after they’ve chosen paint colors, upholstery options, and wheel finishes.
He told Business Insider he keeps track of some clients’ children’s birthdays and regularly speaks with others by phone. If he realizes they’re both in the same region, he’ll ask them to grab dinner.
“If a client feels so comfortable with us in this relationship after having just bought a car for $5 million, I would say that we’ve done something right,” Doering said.
Delightfully un-screened — and a little electric
Bugatti is now preparing to produce the Tourbillon, its first hybrid and the successor to the Chiron. Earlier this month, the company inaugurated a new facility in Molsheim, France, that will support the car’s production.
The Tourbillon pairs a naturally aspirated 8.3-liter V16 engine with three electric motors, producing a combined 1,800 horsepower. Its production run is limited to 250 cars and effectively sold out, Doering said.
He said Bugatti embraces new technology, but not at the expense of the tactile experience its customers expect. He described the industry’s growing reliance on screens as sometimes “a little overkill” compared with physical controls made from materials such as titanium and crystal glass.
“Innovation, yes,” he said, “but never at the cost of emotions.”
That human-first philosophy extends to the way Bugatti develops and builds its cars.
Doering said the company did not use AI to design, develop, or produce the Tourbillon. A spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that AI is not part of the hypercar’s production process.
“They are not utilizing AI for design purposes,” he said. “Maybe that becomes a thought in the future, but at the moment, in the Tourbillon, I don’t think it has been.”
No ‘joyrides’ — and human-made PowerPoints
Like Bugatti’s emphasis on making cars with humans, Doering’s approach to work is also strikingly analog.
He said he occasionally uses Anthropic’s Claude for routine tasks, but described himself as “super old school” and “terrible at AI.”
“I’m still one of the guys who writes his own story and puts his own PowerPoint together,” Doering said. “I don’t touch AI.”
He said building a presentation himself forces him to work through the analysis and storytelling rather than outsourcing the process to a tool.
He said many of those human-centric and relational approaches to his work have helped him realize that childhood dream he had when he started working in that Ikea cafeteria: he now owns an Audi A8 L, a flagship luxury sedan.
Despite his position, he said he won’t keep a Bugatti in his driveway. He drives the company’s cars alongside customers at rallies, but deliberately avoids treating them as personal toys.
“I know where my place is,” he said. “I don’t want to create a perception that the COO of Bugatti of the Americas is going for a joyride in a Bugatti.”
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